Thursday, July 9, 2015

On Transfers. From HuffPo.

More than a third of college students who started in 2008 transferred to another school, according to a new national study, challenging ideas about the typical college trajectory and stoking a debate about how schools should help transfer students.

Out of 3.6 million U.S. students in the study, 37 percent transferred at least once by the summer of 2014, according to the study released Monday by the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Among all students who transferred, almost half switched schools more than once.

1 comment:

My state program includes a moderately famous engineering school with high entry standards and a non-trivial rate of students leaving for greener—or at least less quantitative—pastures. Which is not surprising: all engineering programs have significant numbers of students who change tracks. Including some who could hack it but discovered that they didn't actually enjoy engineering.

Rather than under-utilizing that school's teaching talent for the upper division, or increasing their base enrollment and creating huge introductory classes, the state has encouraged the physics programs at its less prestigious campuses to provide an explicit "getting you ready to transfer to [prestigious engineering school]" curriculum. More than half of the people who start the physics major at my school are on that track and about half of them actually will transfer (and they typically do quite well).

Aside: Indeed we have to keep fighting with the state bureaucrats about it. They want to account those students in the "lose" column for us even though they told us that we should be doing that and the students will be well served by having [prestigious engineering school] on their diplomas instead of [directional state U]. /grumble

To help us do our part, PES at holds a yearly meetup where they tell proffies from the feeder schools what their students need to know and should be preparing for. Including a institution-by-institution ruling on how the feeder school's courses will transfer and what the students should have finished when they do transfer. It gives us an advising template for students who think they want to go that route, and seems to go exactly to the "lowering barriers" suggestion in the article.

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College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.